Reuse and Reengineering of Non-ontological Resources in the Legal Domain

Abstract

Instead of custom-building a new ontology from scratch, knowledge resources can be elicited, reused and engineered to develop legal ontologies with the goal of promoting the application of good practices and speeding up the ontology development process. This paper focuses on the specificities of non-ontological resources in the legal domain, and provides some guidelines of how these can be reused and engineered to enable heterogeneous resources integration within a legal ontology. The paper presents some examples of these processes using a case-study in the consumer law domain.